God of War Collection Faceoff: PS2 vs. PS3

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We pit the HD versions in the compilation against their PS2 counterparts.

By Chris Roper

While PlayStation 3 gamers everywhere await the March release of God of War III, Sony Santa Monica Studios and Bluepoint aim to make the wait just a little bit easier with the release of the God of War Collection. The single Blu-ray disc includes both of the original PlayStation 2 games, with both running in 720p at 60fps with 2x anti-aliasing.

While the games haven't been touched in terms of gameplay, textures, models or anything else of this nature, it naturally looks noticeably better running in HD. The lighting is more natural and the framerate boost provides a tangible difference in the smoothness of the controls.

All of the extras included with both games are here, with the original God of War's behind-the-scenes content viewable directly from within the game, while God of War II's extras show up in the Video portion of the Xross Media Bar (which is nice as it means you can pause and rewind the video).

Click the image to watch gameplay videos from the God of War Collection.

While the in-game visuals are output in HD now, the videos are the same files as before, so they're still in standard-def. However, the PlayStation 3's video output is better than the PS2's, so the clips come out looking a little bit better than before (at least in our tests). The videos are less jaggy and the colors are a bit more natural, but the difference between the movies and in-game stuff is much more apparent with the resolution disparity between the videos and the gameplay.

To show you the differences between the new and old versions, I played through the opening moments of God of War I and II in the Collection as well as the original PS2 discs. I played on a backwards-compatible launch system and switched the PS2 games to widescreen and 480p. This way, it serves as a nice comparison for both backwards-compatible models as well as the PlayStation 2.

Here are some comparison selections from God of War I, with the PS2 game on the top and the Collection version on the bottom. Be sure to view the images at full resolution by clicking on them to really see the differences.